Science & Tech Quote by Bernard Cornwell

There is something quietly subversive in Cornwell framing mentorship as both generous and disembodied: “happily” signals warmth, but the real pivot is the pragmatic demotion of the romantic apprentice-master myth. He’s puncturing the old image of the writer as gatekeeper in a smoke-filled room, replacing it with a bandwidth-based ethic: if you’re serious, you can reach me; if you’re not, the internet will expose that quickly.

The intent reads like reassurance to aspirants and a boundary-setting memo at once. “Anyone who wants mentoring” sounds radically open, but it also shifts responsibility onto the would-be mentee. Wanting it is the entry ticket; doing the work is implied. Cornwell’s subtext is that the bottleneck isn’t access to a famous novelist’s time, it’s persistence and specificity. Online exchange encourages exactly that: questions written down, drafts attached, advice archived. It’s mentorship stripped of ceremony and social performance.

Context matters: Cornwell’s career spans the era when writing felt like a closed circuit of agents, workshops, and metropolitan networks. A bestseller author embracing internet mentoring is a cultural tell that the prestige economy has been reshaped by scale and distance. The web makes mentorship more democratic, but also more transactional. No lunches, no lingering mentorship-as-relationship, fewer illusions of intimacy.

Cornwell isn’t lamenting this; he’s normalizing it. The line suggests a contemporary bargain: wisdom is available, but it comes in emails and threads, not in handshakes. That’s not colder. It’s modern authorship admitting what it has become: public-facing, porous, and constantly in conversation with the next cohort.